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Narrative criminology has made stories respectable again, despite criminology's long-professed ties to a model of positive science. Given the field's continued scepticism about the ‘truthfulness’ of stories, narrative scholars have grappled carefully with the place and utility of lies for understanding the social worlds and individual identities of crime-involved populations. In this chapter, we draw from a study of women's pathways to incarceration in Sri Lanka, analysing the case of one study participant who shared with us many ‘tall tales’ about their life. In comparing Daya's account with those of other participants, we explore the complex relations among ‘truth,’ ‘fiction’ and ‘lies,’ and their implications for narrative criminology. We offer specific cautions about the place of verisimilitude and plausibility in narrative criminologists' efforts to make sense of offender narratives.

Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge racism in American society. In their writing, they explore the many ways in which racism infuses American institutions, popular culture, commonsense beliefs, pervades interaction and cuts to the core of the American psyche. One of the central challenges that any person, scholar, activist faces in the U.S. is the peculiar nature of contemporary discourse on race. Often times, much of white America treats racism as if it were a thing of the past, an article of a time when the racial caste system was explicitly upheld and defended, either in the form of slavery, explicitly racist immigration laws (like the Chinese Exclusion Act), the Jim Crow laws, or when Native Americans were massacred by Union soldiers. Contemporary anti-racist work constantly confronts this denial of racism from a large segment of America.² This denial of racism is one in which many people seem to have developed something of a psychic investment. Since the critical race theorists are working in a scholar-activist anti-racist vein, they also have to confront this massive self-delusion or mythic self-understanding.

For centuries, death has proved itself a well-spring of inspiration for artists and musicians. In particular, an artist's own experiences with death and bereavement often overflow into their creative process, giving birth to artworks which channel grief and embodied experience. Morning Heroes by the British composer Sir Arthur Bliss (1891–1975) is a paradigm of such praxis.

Morning Heroes (1930) was written in memory of Bliss's brother, Kennard, who was killed in action during the First World War. Using an anthology of texts, the work aims to enshrine a universal experience of war for both soldier and civilian and maintains its connection with the British War Requiem through its use of musico-funerary rhetoric. Bliss, who converted to Catholicism during the war, wrote several times in his later life about the spiritual nature of music, specifically its ability to heal and bring peace. It is significant, therefore, that Morning Heroes was to act as a catharsis for Bliss, sublimating his recurring nightmares of the war.

Adopting Douglas Davies' (2017) ‘words against death’ idea, this chapter considers Sir Arthur Bliss's Morning Heroes as ‘music against death’ through an examination of Bliss's use of text and music to craft a requiem in sound. It explores Bliss's use of death rhetoric and embodied experience to create a vehicle for grief and situates this process within the context of his own spiritual philosophies.

Dear reader, lift your eyes momentarily from these words and look around you, to observe how this world is fraught with traces of the East, the yeast fermenting your very existence. Your clothes, your food, your Sony television, your Honda Accord, etc. Even the physical distance between you and the East is blurred as the shirt made in China rubs against and seeps into the atoms of your skin, as the Kimchi Ramen from Korea enters your entrails, as images displayed on your Sony television are reflected upside down at the back of your eyeballs, as the very thought of yEast now leavens in your mind – “leaven” as in “the Levant,” the rising of the sun, hence the East.